Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Can the world afford the Palestinians?

Can the world afford the Palestinians?

In a surprising decision, the High Court of Justice on Sunday rejected a compromise agreement struck between the government and residents of Migron, the largest illegal outpost in Judea and Samaria. The agreement would have allowed the residents to remain in their outpost several years after a mandatory evacuation deadline, but was struck down on the grounds that no group of people is above the law…

This 50-family community, located several miles north of Jerusalem, has become a bone of contention since its establishment in 1999. Left-wing groups claimed the families who set up the community’s first bungalows had illegally trespassed onto privately owned Palestinian land, whereas the residents claimed that they had obtained the necessary authorization to establish the new community. Last August, the High Court of Justice ruled in favor of the left-wing organization Peace Now, which petitioned the court on behalf of the alleged Palestinians [sic] owners of the property. The state was ordered to evacuate the residents and dismantle the site by April 2012, in what was hailed by some as the most important court decision on disputed construction in Judea and Samaria in years.

Without going into all the details, I want to note a few facts.

First, only a small part of the community is built on land that may belong to Palestinians, but the government decided that all of it must be ‘dismantled’.

Second, no Israeli court ruled on the substance of the case — on the question of whose land it was. The government made its decision on the basis of a report written in 2005 by one Talia Sasson, who was head of the state prosecutor’s office at the time.

Sasson is a board member of the New Israel Fund, a member of the Public Council of Yesh Din, a foreign-funded left-wing NGO which carries out ‘lawfare’ against Israel in the name of ‘human rights’, and a Knesset candidate of the fringe New Movement-Meretz party (which has 3 seats out of 120 in the Knesset). She is a professional opponent of the Jewish presence in the territories. Her objectivity is more than questionable, it is non-existent.

Migron residents claim that the land in question was distributed by King Hussein in the 1960′s, was never cultivated or built on, and that the Palestinians that ‘owned’ it were not aware of this until ‘reminded’ of it by Peace Now.

They suggest that if a similar situation had arisen inside the Green Line, an agreement for compensation would have been worked out, rather than an order to ‘dismantle’ the entire community.

The original filing was made by Peace Now, and it provided the attorney.

Peace now is one of numerous organizations ‘watching’ settlements and their residents, listening to and documenting Palestinian complaints, filing lawsuits (as in the case of Migron), producing reports, talking to journalists, etc. Other groups include B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Yesh Din, etc. which are active in or in connection with issues concerning communities in Judea and Samaria.

These organizations are staffed by extreme left-wing Israelis, Arabs and international volunteers. They have almost no support in Israel, and are funded — with millions of Euros and dollars — from European governments, the EU, the US-based New Israel Fund, etc. In a sense, they are the shock troops of the worldwide anti-Israel movement on the ground in Judea and Samaria.

There are also numerous other NGOs, specializing in Jerusalem, Gaza, Arab citizens of Israel, the IDF, etc. NGO Monitor has tirelessly documented their activities and funding.

This is just one area in which Western money is deployed against Israel. Of course the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself — arguably a hostile entity — receives billions of US dollars each year. At a 2007 “donor conference” the international community pledged $7.7 billion for the period of 2008-2010! Keep in mind that the PA pays salaries of employees in Gaza who are either doing nothing or working for Hamas, as well as stipends to activists who are in Israeli prisons for offenses including murder and terrorism.

But even that isn’t all that the world — primarily the US and the EU — is doing for the Palestinians. There is UNRWA, the special Palestinian refugee aid organization, whose function is to encourage growth in the population of stateless Arab ‘refugees’ and prevent their resettlement in any country — except their ‘return’ to an Israel that 95% of them have never seen. UNRWA’s budget in 2009 was $1.9 billion.

What about the special UN organizations in addition to UNRWA, like the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights? The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People? The United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL)? Don’t forget the salary ofthe antisemitic Richard Falk, “UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967″.

What proportion of the UN budget is concerned with the Palestinians? More than you think, when you look at the inordinate attention paid to resolutions condemning Israel in the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, and numerous other agencies.

The Palestinian culture is all about destroying the Jewish one in Israel. I once called them the “anti-Jews” because they invert reality and claim the history, the land, even the Zionist strategy of the Jews. They imitate us in almost every way, except that their story is a lie.

Many elements were complicit in creating and amplifying the Palestinians, from the Nazis that worked together with Haj Amin al-Husseini to plan a Final Solution for the Middle East, and the antisemitic KGB that taught Arafat how to appeal to the Western Left, to the naive do-gooders who still think that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is fundamentally a human-rights issue.

The actual question has almost nothing to do with the Palestinian Arabs and whether they have a state. It has to do with whether the Jews can continue to have one. There is a huge amount of human energy and financial resources that are being wasted in support of the Palestinians. It wouldn’t be necessary if the world could simply get used to the idea of a Jewish state.